Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas

Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture

By Mark Winne
Beacon Press
Publication Date: Oct 12, 2010

Winne challenges the reader to go beyond the popular rhetoric of “eat local” and instead become part of a larger movement to reclaim food sovereignty. Invoking the philosophies of great writers and thinkers including William Blake, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winne writes about the importance of nourishing the body and the soul. The best way to do that, he writes, is by becoming connected to your food source.

Winne is not a food-purist. “I eat meat,” he remarks, “because I have yet to find much in life that competes with a tender rib eye accompanied by a good bottle of zinfandel.” However, his message about how to eat is clear: it is good to eat local, it is better to know the land or the animal that your food comes from, and it is best to grow it yourself.

Throughout the book Winne also maintains the importance of becoming involved in the politics of food, on the local and national levels. “It is not enough to satisfy your own desire for simplicity and good food, and to only be an informed food consumer,” he writes. “You need to be an informed food citizen as well.”

In the first part of the book, Winne describes the urgency of the current food crisis and discusses the damage that has already been done. “While there can be little doubt that never have so few produced so much food for so many,” he writes, “such an abundance has come at a high cost to the environment, human health, food and agricultural workers, farm animals, wildlife, and the social and economic fabric of many American communities.” By identifying a number of ways in which the industrial food system is trying to gain additional control over consumers, from “greenwashing” products to taking part in corrupt legislative and legal activities, Food Rebels chronicles the inherent differences between an industrialized system, which focuses on the bottom line despite high environmental and human costs, and the alternative system, which aims to manage food in an accessible and sustainable way.

In the second part of Food Rebels, Winne profiles people around the country (and one story from South Korea) working in the areas of food production, food education, and food democracy. He speaks to urban farmers in Cleveland who are turning empty lots into flourishing gardens, food educators in Austin who are teaching low and middle income families how to make positive changes to their eating habits, and a Native American tribe in New Mexico using food-related economic development to bring self-reliance and good health back to its people, Winne finds inspiring examples from those who are working against the marketing efforts and scare tactics put forth by the industrial food industry and taking steps to provide a higher quality of life to their communities. “The argument we must make is for action, not contemplation,” writes Winne. “We must engage the food system, not presume that all is well because the food system feeds us.”

Winne believes that in order to secure food sovereignty, people must get their “hands in the soil,” either by growing it themselves, becoming more connected to their local food communities, or participating in the democratic processes around food issues. Food Rebels is his call to action. “As I look into the future of food and democracy in the twenty-first century, I see two options,” he writes. “We will either shape our own food destiny or we will succumb to one that is presented to us. Placing ourselves in the hands of others can be either an act of profound trust, or one of unsettling risk.”

See the book here.